Today, though, my attempt to by a bottle of Coke was met with the stern message above.

It wasn’t a surprise. I was expecting it, actually.

I wanted to verify reports that CVS is now blocking NFC-payment services – including Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Softcard – in their stores even though the NFC terminals remain in place for now.

Yep, looks that way. Rival Rite Aid is doing the same thing.

This is kind of silly. Why would a retailer turn away a paying customer, one who has regularly visited in the past?

The retailers’ likely reasons are consumer-unfriendly: They are denying customers one payment option because they want to force another one, called CurrentC, on them.

Read this, this and this for a close and critical look at CurrentC, which won’t widely deploy until next year.

In the meantime, retailers who have signed deals with CurrentC creator Merchant Customer Exchange must stay exclusive – Though MCX says they can drop CurrentC without penalty in order to accept other payment systems.

As of today, I’m no longer a CVS customer. I don’t need to be with a Walgreens within walking distance of my house and another a short stroll from my office – with both cheerfully taking my money, and that of other Google Wallet and Apple Pay customers, via NFC.

I’m still getting this annoying message when I try to enter my SPIRE card information into Apple’s Passbook app:

That’s because SPIRE wants to offer Apple Pay and has applied to do so, but doesn’t have control over when this happens. As a spokeswoman told me:

Apple determines the timing of adding banks/credit unions to their Apple Pay system, and we at SPIRE haven’t been given a date yet.

So, for now, I’ll keep using Google Wallet, which is great.

A Google+ follower of mine, Carlos Zorrilla of the Dominican Republic – ¡merengue! – notes one bit of irony:

Who would had thought that Apple Pay was going to negatively affect Google Wallet in the sense that the places were Wallet was already accepted would be now prohibited with Apple Pay? And some people say Apple was needed to to push NFC payments further. The irony.